The Fall of Never(94)

She only looked at him with blank, confused eyes. As if something both beautiful and intelligent was now lost to her. What had she seen? What things had the old woman projected in her mind?

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I had no idea. You…are you all right? Are you scared? Angry?”

Again, no response.

“Marie…” Her silence agitated him. In his mind he relived the events in that bedroom—the electrically-charged atmosphere, the pulsing inside his own head…the image of some strange girl on a wooded hillside just moments before his body was blown clear across the room and slammed into the wall.

“Orange juice,” Marie said after some time, and it would have to be good enough.

She didn’t leave the bedroom that first day. He sat with her for as long as he could tolerate. Twice, his mother came knocking at the door to see if Marie was all right. He called back that she was, and that she was just resting.

On the second day, when her condition showed no sign of improvement, Carlos again tried to talk with her. But there was nothing he could say to get her to open up to him. It was almost impossible to see any hint of the old Marie in her eyes, and that frightened him more than anything. It was as if she were someplace else…some distant land, never to return…

While he stood on the porch later that afternoon smoking a cigarillo, Marie slid the deck door open and stepped out into the cold, wearing only the bedclothes Carlos had dressed her in the night before. He turned and was surprised to see her standing there, was almost glad…then noticed the vacant look in her eyes. He felt like a child reminded of a nightmare.

“You’re going to catch cold out here like this, darling,” he told her, flicking the cigarillo off the deck.

She said, “There are some things I need.”

He was shocked to hear her speak. “Yes,” he said, “of course. What?”

“Books,” she said.

“All right. You want books. All the books in the world you could possibly want.”

“Children’s books. Storybooks. Tales.”

“Tales?” he said. “Like fairy tales?”

She nodded once—head up, head down—her eyes never leaving his. They’d grown dark and brooding, he noticed, rimmed with calculation. What was she thinking? What was going on inside her head?

What did that old witch do to you? he wondered. Did she do something to your mind?

Marie’s hands went up to her stomach, rubbed it tenderly.

“Okay,” he said, and she turned and slipped back inside the house.

A half-hour later, Carlos was at the library, absently extracting children’s picture books off the shelf until the muscles in his arms began groaning.

Once upon a time there was this old crippled witch who knew something she had no right knowing. And she whispered words. This witch posed as a harmless old woman with a heart to help, and managed to trick a young doctor into bringing his pregnant wife into the witch’s home. There, she quickly administered a spell rendering the poor pregnant woman dispassionate and aloof, nearly in a walking coma, while her husband felt his last nerves begin to unravel. This was all part of the witch’s plan, for she fed off the pure evil derived from such acts, and off the harm she happened to bring to others. And in the end, as the young doctor’s sanity finally fell apart and his poor wife slipped deeper and deeper inside herself, the old witch only laughed and laughed and laughed and lived happily ever after.

Before leaving the library, he passed down an aisle of psychology books. Soon, he found one on mind-reading and other psychic phenomena. The cover looked colorful and the doctor’s name sounded like something from a lousy paperback romance. He muttered the name aloud to himself and forced a tired smirk.

Ding-dong, the witch is dead, he thought.

At home, he distributed the children’s books to his wife, who accepted them with unaffected lethargy moments before disappearing into their bedroom and shutting the door behind her.

His own book in hand, Carlos sat on the back porch, lit his last cigarillo, and began to read:



Though most skeptics believe otherwise, telekinesis is quite real. Laymen understand it to be the power to manipulate physical objects without the demonstration of physical attributes, i.e., with the mind. This is due largely to mental focus and control. Telekinesis is best defined as a higher state of consciousness, where thoughts are formed in the collective unconscious mind and are executed in the form of actions via conscious and rational thought. Tapping this power insists that the conduit, or subject, use much more than the average ten percent of their brain. Primitive man made use of this ability to ensure his survival; today, having no need for such an ability, most of us have forgotten how to tap into this source.



He pulled on the cigarillo, sputtered a cough, and looked out over the porch railing at the large apartment complexes on the other side of the courtyard. Against the gray backdrop of a prewinter sky, the buildings appeared hungry and desolate, ancient and timeworn, too heavy on the ground and too rigid and full to be real. They also seemed impossibly close…as if he’d be able to reach out and brush their facades with the tips of his fingers.

Looking down, he noticed his hands were shaking.

I’m on my way to a nervous breakdown, he thought. Can bet the farm on that.

He skipped several pages and read on: